Saturday, July 26, 2014

I’ve told my travel writing students to check facts. It’s not simply a matter of honesty,
though. Very often questions of courtesy
arise out of the impulses of responsibility, and the issue is not only one of
truth but of an even wider integrity.

Which is why, today, I am owning up about my Ljubljana entry
late last month. That it was an honest
error I hope you’ll believe. But I stand
here corrected nonetheless, and in a way I hope will enlighten some of you as
it did me.

A while after I posted the article about our Slovenian trip,
I received an email from my friend Vlado, who corrected—with his typical
graciousness and good humor—a mistake I made in the chronicling. Let him speak for himself, in the words of
his amiable letter:

by the
way - got a phone call from Slovenian president (it is a small country!) and
some "anonymous threatening letters" (probably nationalists) about
that "jeans matter”

Typical
of his humor—sly and playful—but he goes on to make a point about a situation that
at some time I had known, but had conveniently shed the knowledge as I wrote my
entry on Ljubljana:

former
Yugoslavia had quite open borders and also all same/similar consumer goods as
in Italy/Austria and rest of the Europe (of course there were some import
restrictions as well, but only for very special goods or quantity limits for
personal import)... so - no typical "border bribes" in form of
jeans. I'd been talking about Czechoslovakia
and Russia (Soviet bloc - no jeans or jeans factories there) - former Yugoslavia
was not in the same bloc.

Yes, I’d known about Yugoslavia’s
non-alignment under Tito and after, known that the more open borders and the
dramatically varied terrain had served as locations for U.S. and Western films
as varied as Kelly’s Heroes to portions of Fiddler on the Roof. But one border story—Vlado’s about crossing
into Czechoslovakia in the old days—had dispelled my previous knowledge and pushed
me back onto the stereotype of my American raising: how everything behind (or even
remotely around) the “Iron Curtain” was barbed wire and statues of Stalin, tinted
in relentless grayscale and sunless because we chose to see it that way.

And Vlado, gently but with a
focused wisdom, pointed to the heart of the error:

seems in
the rule, "the big one" or isolated countries don't have much or
correct information about the rest of the world (or perhaps even about real
situation in their own country - who knows)... on other side small
nations/countries collect all possible information and learn as much as they
can about big countries - what do you think?

Well, Vlado, I think you may be
right. Bargaining and traveling from a
tradition of economic and global privilege that has lasted my life, my countrymen are too ready to assume that
the world is the way we see it, forgetting that we bring the vision, the
outline, the colors of the country with us on our journey. We characterize others according to the
images we have nurtured and often distorted for generations (and I believe
other countries more economically powerful do this as well—particularly Russia
and China at the moment) and are surprised when others don’t match our
assumptions. And yes, smaller countries
do this as well—it’s all part of what Richard Pryor used to characterize as “a
lot of people getting together to not understand each other,” and therefore
part of a human condition. But maybe people in power tend to misunderstand more because the margin of error is
greater.